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Speaking- sedighe Eyvazi
Speaking ' ' Introduction Speaking in a second language (L2) has been considered the most challenging of the four skills given the fact that it involves a complex process of constructing meaning (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000). This process requires speakers to make decisions about why, how and when to communicate depending on the cultural and social context in which the speaking act occurs (Burns and Seidlhofer 2002). Additionally, it involves a dynamic interrelation between speakers and hearers that results in their simultaneous interaction of producing and processing spoken discourse under time constraints. Given all these defining aspects of the complex and intricate nature of spoken discourse, increasing research conducted over the last few decades has recognized speaking as an interactive, social and contextualized communicative event. Therefore, the key role of the speaking skill in developing learners’ communicative competence has also become evident, since this skill requires learners to be in possession of knowledge abouthow to produce not only linguistically correct but also pragmatically appropriate utterances. Approaches to learning and teaching speaking Since advances in language learning over the past decades have influenced how speaking has been learned and taught, a review of the role that this skill has played within the three approaches to language learning described by Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor (this volume), namely those of environmentalist, innatist and interactionist. Speaking within an environmentalist approach ' ' Up to the end of the 1960s, the field of language learning was influenced by environmentalist ideas that paid attention to the learning process as being conditioned by the external environment rather than by human internal mental processes. Moreover, mastering a series of structures in a linear way was paramount (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). Within such an approach, the primacy of speaking was obvious since it was assumed that language was primarily an oral phenomenon. Thus, learning to speak a language, in a similar way to any other type of learning, followed a stimulus- response-reinforcement pattern which involved constant practice and the formation of good habits (Burns and Joyce 1997). In this pattern, speakers were first exposed to linguistic input as a type of external stimulus and their response ''consisted of imitating and repeating such input. If this was done correctly, they received a positive ''reinforcement ''by other language users within their same environment. The continuous practice of this speech-pattern until good habits were formed resulted in learning how to speak. Consequently, it was assumed that speaking a language involved just repeating, imitating and memorizing the input that speakers were exposed to. '''Speaking within an innatist approach' By the late 1960s, the previous view of learning to speak as a mechanical process consisting in the oral repetition of grammatical structures was challenged by Chomsky’s (1957, 1965) theory of language development. His assumption that children are born with an innate potential for language acquisition was the basis for the innatist approach to language learning (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). Thus, as a result of this assumption and together with the discipline of psycholinguistics that aimed to test Chomsky’s innatist theory, the mental and cognitive processes involved in generating language began to gain importance. Within such an approach, it was claimed that regardless of the environment where speakers were to produce language, they had the internal faculty, or competence in Chomsky’s (1965) terms, to create and understand an infinite amount of discourse (Hughes 2002). This language ability was possibly due to the fact that speakers had internalized a system of rules which could be transformed into new structures by applying a series of cognitive strategies. Given this process, speakers’ role changed from merely receiving input and repeating it, as was the view in the environmentalist approach, to actively thinking how to produce language. Consequently, it was assumed that language was a descontextualized process which just involved the mental transformation of such an internalized system of rules. Speaking within an interactionist approach ' ' During the late 1970s and the 1980s, important shifts in the field of language learning took place under the influence of interactionist ideas that emphasized the role of the linguistic environment in interaction with the innate capacity for language development (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). The changes under this approach were thus characterized by an increasing recognition of the need to examine the complex cognitive processes involved in producing oral language from a more dynamic and interactive perspective. Additionally, such a perspective should also pay attention to the functions that producing spoken language fulfills, as well as accounting for the social and contextual factors that intervene in such speech production act. The importance of the model developed by Levelt (1989) with the identification of the underlying processes involved in producing oral discourse was also consistent with both functional (Halliday 1973, 1975, 1985) and pragmatic (Searle, Kiefer, and Bierwisch, 1980; Leech 1983; Levinson 1983) views of language. In fact, these two fields of research paid attention to speakers’ communicative intent as being central to the connection between the meanings they wanted to communicate and the form through which those meanings could be expressed. Moreover, as a result of the emergence of discourse analysis, which described language in use at a level above the sentence (McCarthy 1991), producing spoken language was no longer seen in terms of repeating single words or creating oral utterances in isolation, but rather as elaborating a piece of discourse (i.e., a text) that carried out a communicative function and was affected by the context in which it was produced. Teaching speaking within a communicative competence framework Communicative approaches to L2 language teaching have undergone significant changes over the past two decades. A strong background influence is associated with the work developed by Hymes (1971, 1972), who was the first to argue that Chomsky’s (1965) distinction between competence and performance did not pay attention to aspects of language in use and related issues of appropriacy of an utterance to a particular situation. Thus, he proposed the term ''communicative competence ''to account for those rules of language use in social context as well as the norms of appropriacy. Considering how a proper operationalization of this term into an instructional framework could contribute to make the process of L2 teaching more effective, different models of communicative competence have been developed since the 1980s by specifying which components should integrate a communicative competence construct.